Eugenio Cambaceres
Encyclopedia
Argentina
Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...
writer and politician. In the 1880s he wrote four books, with Sin rumbo (1885) being his masterpiece. His promising literary career was cut short when he died of tuberculosis
Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis, MTB, or TB is a common, and in many cases lethal, infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis usually attacks the lungs but can also affect other parts of the body...
.
Biography
Son of a FrenchFrance
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
chemist
Chemist
A chemist is a scientist trained in the study of chemistry. Chemists study the composition of matter and its properties such as density and acidity. Chemists carefully describe the properties they study in terms of quantities, with detail on the level of molecules and their component atoms...
father who immigrated to Argentina
Argentina
Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...
in 1833 and a mother native to Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires is the capital and largest city of Argentina, and the second-largest metropolitan area in South America, after São Paulo. It is located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent...
. Cambaceres went to secondary school at the Colegio Nacional Central and then went on to receive a law degree
Law degree
A Law degree is an academic degree conferred for studies in law. Such degrees are generally preparation for legal careers; but while their curricula may be reviewed by legal authority, they do not themselves confer a license...
from the Universidad de Buenos Aires.
Quickly launching into politics, he was elected to the Argentine Chamber of Deputies
Argentine Chamber of Deputies
The Chamber of Deputies is the lower house of the Argentine National Congress. This Chamber holds exclusive rights to create taxes, to draft troops, and to accuse the President, the ministers and the members of the Supreme Court before the Senate....
and was named secretary of the Club del Progreso in 1870, and in 1873 became Vice President of said organization. However, his denunciations of fraud within his own party led to his downfall, and although he was re-elected to the legislature in 1876 he soon resigned his post and left public life to devote himself to literature. From his career as a liberal politician, perhaps his most important contribution was a controversial tract in a local magazine advocating the separation of Church and State that was quite polemic at the time.
As a writer, he combined the naturalism
Naturalism (literature)
Naturalism was a literary movement taking place from the 1880s to 1940s that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character...
of Émile Zola
Émile Zola
Émile François Zola was a French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism...
and the Goncourt brothers
Goncourt brothers
The Goncourt brothers were Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt , both French naturalist writers. They formed a partnership that "is possibly unique in literary history...
and a localized realist
Realism (arts)
Realism in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects "in accordance with secular, empirical rules", as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation...
character with four novels of a pessimistic nature. His first two novels were Pot-pourri (1881) and Música sentimental: Silbidos de un vago [Sentimental Music: Whistles of a Lazy Man] (1884). Both lack a precise plot and leave many threads hanging, containing stories of adultery within a pessimistic and weary atmosphere. The novelty of dealing with such a lurid topic and in such a crude manner provoked a scandalous repercussion and critics did not hesitate in directly attacking Cambaceres. This changed the composition and style of his later works, which were much better received.
In 1885 he released his most significant novel, Sin Rumbo [Without Direction], where he offered good descriptions of the landscape of sexual pathology, including interesting anecdotes. The year before he died 1887, he published En la sangre (In the Blood), a story about the son of Italian
Italian people
The Italian people are an ethnic group that share a common Italian culture, ancestry and speak the Italian language as a mother tongue. Within Italy, Italians are defined by citizenship, regardless of ancestry or country of residence , and are distinguished from people...
immigrants of humble origin that advances his social standing by marrying the daughter of a wealthy estate, only to squander his fortune and end up with a miserable life. Through his writing, Cambaceres dealt with the problems associated with the arrival of Immigrants to Argentina
Immigration to Argentina
Immigration in Argentina, can be divided in several major stages:* Spanish colonization starting in the 16th century, integrating the indigenous inhabitants ....
and the social changes of his time, but ended up taking the perspective of the high bourgeoisie that critiqued the lower classes and European immigration.
Eugenio Cambaceres travelled to Europe and was in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
when he died at 45 years of age, in 1888. His daughter, Rufina Cambaceres, was only four years old.
Further reading
- R. Anthony Castagnaro, The Early Spanish American Novel (1971), pp. 119–129.
- María Luisa Bastos, introduction to Sin rumbo (1971), pp. 7–29.
- J.P. Spicer-Escalante, Visiones patológicas nacionales: Lucio Vicente López, Eugenio Cambaceres y Julián Martel ante la distopía argentina finisecular. Gaithersburg, MD: Ediciones Hispamérica, 2006.
- J.P. Spicer-Escalante, "Novedad estética/Crítica social: Eugenio Cambaceres y Sin Rumbo. Eugenio Cambaceres, Sin Rumbo. Ed. J.P. Spicer-Escalante, Buenos Aires: StockCero, Inc., vii-xxvi.
- J.P. Spicer-Escalante, A Non-Imperial Eye/I: Europe as “Contact Zone” in Eugenio Cambaceres’s Música sentimental (1884). Brújula: revista interdisciplinaria sobre estudios latinoamericanos 3.1: 53-68.
- J.P. Spicer-Escalante, Civilización y barbarie: Naturalism’s Paradigms of Self and Nationhood in Eugenio Cambaceres’ Sin rumbo (1885). Excavatio XIII: 299-309.